Researchers from Cleveland Clinic and Cleveland-based MetroHealth System are using a $3.14 million grant to create "digital twins" from EHR data to reduce health disparities.
The National Institutes of Health grant will help create virtual communities, or digital replicas of real neighborhoods, from a research registry of more than 250,000 patients from the two health systems. The data will include deidentified health information and social determinants of health, including economic and environmental factors.
"Instead of building these models from scratch, other health systems and organizations can adapt the framework for their own needs," said Adam Perzynski, PhD, of MetroHealth's Population Health Research Institute, in a Feb. 21 news release.
The digital twins will be used to assess potential mental health and cardiovascular initiatives by neighborhood and evaluate how frequent, financially driven relocations affect health outcomes.
"Neighborhood health disparities in Cleveland are severe, among the most severe in the country," said Jarrod Dalton, PhD, director of Cleveland Clinic's Center for Populations Health Research. "This is the biggest problem in population health of our time."